![]() Basically, both sides are only talking because neither has a big enough stick at the moment. Unfortunately, the game's idiom is “everyone wants to kill you most of the time” so that's what a lot of diplomacy comes down to: tech trades, threats (stay out of my system), declarations of war, peace negotiations, and so on. Diplomacy is acceptable – the other species are colorfully rendered, and their actions generally make sense given the game's idiom. Once you have an economy going it's time to deal with the other species. It looks like there is a lot of tech to choose from, but you'll pretty much just want the weapons and armor tech. You can either make a lot of choices that don't make much difference, or none at all. However, after a while there are so many planets that need stuff built on them it is easy to get frustrated and just turn on the planetary governor, which obviates the need for the building mechanic in the first place. Buildings do the usual – create troops, provide production, etc., so you can craft a planet the way you want. The individual planets are composed of squares upon which buildings can be built. Planet-building can also become micro-management. After you empire becomes a certain size you can easily spend most of your time setting up these resource shuttles. In SD it becomes an exercise in micromanagement. In turn, Mechtopia could export its excess production to other planets, allowing them to finish construction projects faster.īy itself this would make for an interesting economic/empire-building game. For example, Breadonia (an agricultural planet) can ship its excess food production to Mechtopia (an industrial planet), allowing Mechtopia to support more workers than it otherwise could. An interesting feature is the ability to ship excess resources from one planet to another. In actual play any planet that is bad at agriculture and industry usually becomes a research planet because SD scientists like crummy planets, I guess. There are three primary types: agricultural, industrial, and research. The best way to get rolling is to grab a few planets. Everyone must agree with you or you must kill them, and everything you do for the entire game should be aimed at one or the other.īut before your race is ready to struggle on a galactic scale it should have a firm economic basis. There is no tech victory, nor can one build a “wonder” or simply earn enough money. The game can only end through either forcing everyone into an alliance or, failing that, killing them all. It turns out most of the traits don't make that much of a difference in the long run. This crops up again and again in “StarDrive” - it seems like you have a choice, but it actually doesn't make that much of a difference what you do. This takes away from the feeling of distinct races while providing a feeling of customization, making the whole thing a wash. You start out with a certain number of points: buying positive traits costs points, taking negative traits gives you more points to spend on positive traits. These traits can influence game play by making certain actions easier – better research, easier colonization, or harder – worse research, more expensive ships. There are space bears, space Cthulhu, space mollusks, and others, each of which have their own default traits. Each species has its own graphics, which look nice. The player starts out by choosing a species. I wonder if they will be updating MoO the same way they did Baldur's Gate?”. One is left thinking “I should have played one of those other games instead. One can see the influence of those games on SD, it's just that SD doesn't do anything very original with those influences. It is certainly no “Master of Orion” or “Galactic Civilizations”. This reviewer will spare you some reading and simply state up front: “StarDrive” (SD) is not all that good. I don't know what the problem is - “Civilization” was great, but there are other land-based 4X games people like just as well. ![]() Many have tried (“Sword of the Stars”, “Galactic Civilizations”, etc.) but none have really succeeded. The first question everybody asks when a new game in the genre comes out is, “Is it as good as Master of Orion?”. This 8-ball has a name, and its name is “Master of Orion”. Space-based 4X games always start out behind the 8-ball.
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